ReefFrenzy

Thanks everyone! Joe it's been an insane ride that's for sure and I don't think anyone, myself included could have predicted where we would end up. I've met a lot of great folks along the way and have had one hell of an education on nutrition and business. We're looking forward to seeing what the next few years bring!

It's been a while since I've posted, but to be honest we've had so many "work from sun up to sun down" days over the past year that I haven't been able to post on many club forums. Our LRS Foods Facebook page and my personal page, as well as Instagram are where we are posting daily updates. While our own brand of food continues to rise in popularity with retailers, public aquaria and aquaculture markets have opened up for us and been a huge and steady stream of orders. Our Fertility Frenzy food continues to be a favorite of places line Biota and facilities in Florida and Hawaii. We had many requests from retailers to pick up complimentary products to "bundle" with our foods to make getting premium foods easier and delivered frozen solid. So we now have seven food brands under our distribution umbrella with the most recent addition being the line of Hikari Frozen foods. These are the brands we distribute to local fish stores... Naturally adding all this food to our line up of product offerings required more freezers and storage space. So last May we broke ground on the "LRS Annex" and had a Grand Opening party on October 20th. The first floor consists of a shipping station with scales, freezers, refrigerators, foam coolers, dry food racks, and more. The second floor has a "LRS Lounge" for entertaining industry guests (which we get a lot of) and an office space which I will be moving into soon. This new structure is across the driveway from our production kitchen which now has doubled in size since the shipping supplies have been moved out. So a lot has been going on here for the past 6-12 months and we are now staffed with 7 employees. My daughter managing the front of the house operations with customer service and order processing and my son managing the back end with inventory and shipping. I've delegated 90% of my responsibilities, both as a failsafe to make sure the business can operate without me while I am still lurking in the background, but also to let my adult kids grow into their respective roles. Here are a few pics to give you an idea of what we've been up to... New freezers in the shipping center for pulling orders quickly to pack and ship out. A wall of New Life Spectrum pellets and flakes. Unpacking a 55 case shipment of Hikari USA frozen foods. A pallet of PE Mysis being offloaded into our walk-in freezer. My son and I on a typical shipping day. My soon to be office upstairs. Orders about to have dry ice added to the top before sealing and shipping. This is what the shipping station looks like before the mayhem starts. Lastly, this is my daily sidekick, my grandson who comes to work every day, steals the fruit out of my salad at lunch and pretty much hangs in my office or the shipping station. If you have read this far I appreciate it and thank you very much for your support!

Hey Gang sorry to have been AWOL but we have had a LOT going on the past year. We built a 2800 square food distribution center and I now distribute SEVEN brands of food to 500+ retailers in the US and abroad. I hate to hear that some folks are having difficulty sourcing our foods. We do everything we can to make sure our dealers have the easiest way to re-order and run promotions to help off set the shipping costs from time to time. Someone mentioned a group buy but unfortunately our accounting and inventory system doesn't even have retail pricing in it, nor are we registered to collect sales tax or file same. I'll make a post in a minute about our latest developments and I hope local accessibility improves. We are shipping over 100 boxes every week to all parts of the US and we get two Fed Ex pick ups now.

Really it depends on how many fish you have. Simply break off a small piece and go from there. If you have 3-5 fish say, like clowns and cardinals feed a piece the size of a dime and see how much is consumed and how fast. If needed go up to a piece the size of a nickel or so. You just want to avoid having a "blizzard" of excessive amounts of uneaten food blowing around the tank. Hope this helps!

Thanks for the feedback and thanks for posting the link. I forgot to insert it before finishing the post. It reads a lot better now. lol

It was great seeing everyone at the Expo! I've been slammed since returning home but I plan on bringing everyone up to speed with what's been happening at LRS HQ. It's all good stuff I promise. More exports, more product lines under our roof and next week we break ground on a new building to house more freezers and dry goods. In the meantime.... At LRS Foods we strive to be on the leading edge of innovation when it comes to aquarium nutrition. We process premium, human-grade, FDA certified seafood ingredients, then add costly supplements such as live blackworms, fresh fish eggs, PE Mysis®, Astaxanthin, betacarotene and more to create the highest quality foods possible. In 2013 we began adding active cultures of probiotic bacteria to our foods in order to offer the benefits which have worked in aquaculture of fish for human consumption for decades. Initially people were skeptical about this change to our foods since at the time we were the only frozen food on the market with "active bacteria." However, it didn't take long for the results to speak for themselves. Soon prominent researchers were reporting healthier broodstock, better egg quality, and more robust larvae. There are over a dozen captive breeding projects listed on our website where LRS foods were credited with assisting captive breeding efforts. Some of them you may have heard about such as the blue hippo tang, yellow tang, flathead perch, Gramma dejongi and others. Some of the rarest fish in the hobby have been captive bred on LRS Foods with probiotics. The details are listed here: http://www.larrysreefservices.com/testimonials.htmlEarlier this week researchers at the MOTE Marine Laboratory in FL published an article with their peer reviewed findings regarding their experience with probiotics and marine fish. The article is very informative and confirms that probiotics in aquarium feeds can offer real benefits. It is worth a look and it is very exciting that probiotics are now being given the proper credit that we knew they had all along.

Glad to see this problem solved and sorry for the heartache!

Heading to the airport soon and I just tossed a couple of these in my bag. Let's see who the lucky ones will be who sit in for my presentation and walk away with some LRS swag?! See you guys soon!

Looking forward to this weekend!

Oh man, you're putting the pressure on me to do a great presentation.

Thanks! I'm looking forward to it as well.

I'me sure we will be able to bring some goodies to the swap. It should be a lot of fun!

I wanted to start by saying I am super humbled to be invited to speak at the club event! I did a presentation at an event in Utah a few months ago and it was very well received. I typically start off with a brief intro and backstory of how I went from a hobbyist to launching a business with products sold in about nine countries. (A lot of folks say this part of the presentation was really entertaining and inspiring.) Moving on, we'll touch base about some differences between various foods and how you can make informed purchasing choices. Topics such as safe handling and storage tips for frozen food, interpreting nutritional information, Innovations in foods such as probiotics and pigmentation enhancers will be mentioned as will supplements such as garlic and ginger. Some of the material does reference the various captive breeding projects we have been involved with and how proper nutrition is important for broodstock. I haven't had anyone throw tomatoes yet and nearly everyone gives feedback that they learned a few new things from the presentation. I'm looking forward to the trip and meeting some new friends! Thank you all again for the invite and interest.

Let's just say that providing the food which helped make the whole process happen gets you a big discount on the babies.

At LRS Foods we have been fortunate to have the opportunity to work with the most talented and experienced breeders in the marine hobby. We have used their feedback and suggestions to improve our foods so they can be optimal for both hobbyists and breeders. Our Fertility Frenzy® broodstock conditioning diet has been credited with over a dozen captive breeding successes. The good news is that even the standard LRS blends contain the same fresh, diverse seafood ingredients as the "Who's Your Daddy" blend so your fish can thrive too. The freshness and diversity of our ingredients results in a nutritional profile unmatched by any other food in our hobby.In 2017 Todd Gardner announced to the world that he had successfully captive bred yet another marine fish. This time it was the Rainfordia opercularis, which is a fish rarely seen in the aquarium trade. There were previously only a handful in the US, so when we were fortunate enough to house a pair of these exotic fish we were extremely thankful. You can read all about these fish and how they were conditioned on LRS foods here: https://reefs.com/magazine/captive-culture-of-the-flathead-perch-208/ It is an amazing and humbling honor to care for fish which have been captive bred using our foods. They have settled in nicely, are eating LRS Chunky blend and seem to be inseparable. I shot this quick video tonight of them hanging out in their little cave. If you have inquires about purchasing one of these rare beauties for your aquarium please contact: fluiddynamicsint@gmail.com